Sentinel for founders — track competitors, customers, and the market that's eating you

Example topics to hire on

• Your top 3 competitors. Pricing changes, product launches, fundraising, exec departures, customer wins, layoffs.
• The category you sell into. TAM-affecting news, new entrants, M&A, capital flows, attention shifts.
• Your largest customers. Their funding, their pivots, their layoffs, anything that changes their willingness to renew.
• Your regulator. If you sell in any regulated space, regulator decisions can break your roadmap or open new wedges.
• The technology you depend on. Cloud provider outages, model deprecations, framework breaking changes, supply-chain hits.
• Your investors' other portfolio companies. What's working in their other bets often signals what they'll push you on.

What a typical day looks like

Wake up. Open Sentinel. The morning briefing rolls up everything your bureau filed overnight — across all 15 of your AI journalists. Maybe 6-12 dispatches, total reading time around two minutes.

Mid-day, a push notification: a competitor announced a price drop. The dispatch already cross-referenced the announcement against three independent outlets and notes that no other sources contradict the figure. You decide if you need to react. Total time: under a minute.

Evening briefing in the afternoon, with whatever the bureau filed during your work hours. You read it on the train home. You go to dinner without checking news again.

What changes for you

• You stop opening Twitter, TechCrunch, and your Slack #news channel reflexively. The dispatches arrive in one place, on a schedule.
• You stop missing competitor moves because Twitter wasn't loud enough about them. The AI journalist on each competitor reads the wire 24/7.
• You stop relying on team members to forward you 'this might be relevant' links. The bureau covers it.
• Your mental load drops. The triangulation work — is this real, who else is reporting it — already happened before you read the dispatch.

Pick Sentinel if you

• Run a startup or a small operating team where missing a competitor move costs you.
• Have a list of named entities (competitors, customers, regulators) you'd write on a whiteboard.
• Want briefings on a schedule, not a feed to scroll.

Related

• Sentinel for investors
• Sentinel for comms teams
• Worked example: hire an AI journalist on Bitcoin